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This summer, my divorced parents both happen to be downsizing at the same time, and while neither of them lives in the apartment I grew up in, I\u2019ve sneakily\/luckily managed to keep stuff squirreled away in their homes. When they asked me to go through my old things, I was surprised by my reaction\u2026<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t want to keep all that stuff, but I definitely didn\u2019t want them<\/em> to get rid of it. Closing the Museum of Me?!?! I don\u2019t think so. I dragged my feet, complained, and expressed pretty much zero gratitude to the people who had allowed their homes to be storage units for things that didn\u2019t mean much to them, like the letters I got at sleep-away camp a thousand years ago. <\/p>\n Still, there were some real gems in the mix. Although I\u2019m not very handy, I took shop class from kindergarten through middle school. In the archives was a hinged box I made at age five and then lined with purple velvet.<\/p>\n Still proud of this. <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t want this wooden doll I made?\u201d I asked my dad, later. \u201cEven though she has movable arms, braids made of yellow wire attached to a nail driven into her head, and a matching bed with painted roses?\u201d I was serious. He smiled but did not say yes. <\/p>\n Lots of my early art was very, very large. My mom had a 3\u00d75 foot framed painting I did of Demeter and Persephone from when we studied Greek mythology, and my dad had my similarly sized self-portrait from elementary school, notable for the fact that I accidentally put the eyebrows under<\/em> the eyes.<\/p>\n School photos from when I was three (left) and four. The turtleneck has the words \u201cbig enough\u201d printed around the torso, and I wish my parents had kept that!<\/em><\/p>\n Even though I\u2019d already whittled down my collection of please-don\u2019t-throw-aways at various points since graduating from high school, the current process was exhausting. I tossed the school yearbooks but kept the school photos. I held onto books I\u2019d loved as a kid and shoved a few boxes of paper ephemera in the back of my closet. Somewhere in that mess is my ticket to see the Spice Girls at Madison Square Garden in 1998 and the diary I tried to disguise as a school notebook by writing INGLISH on the front cover. (Spelling has never been my strong suit.)<\/p>\n Bye, chairs :\/<\/em><\/p>\n Heading back to Brooklyn, I brought two old kid-sized wooden chairs home with me. But after moving them around my apartment for a few weeks, I realized I didn\u2019t have room. I worked up my courage for days, then put them out on the street and walked away with a real pang of sadness.<\/p>\n When I went to the bodega later, the chairs still hadn\u2019t been snagged, and I almost brought them home again. I somehow resisted the urge, and by the next morning, they were gone. I still miss them, but I like to think that they\u2019re getting more use in a Brooklyn kid\u2019s bedroom.<\/p>\n I took home the velvet lined box (of course!!!) and a goofy paper mach\u00e9 vase that our brilliant art teacher had us build around a tennis ball canister so it could hold water and flowers. I declined to keep my gigantic self-portrait with the under-eye eyebrows, but I still have the memory of my brothers laughing at it over the years. I neither took nor tossed the wooden doll. She is sleeping peacefully in her custom wooden bed with roses painted on it in a closet at my dad\u2019s house. I\u2019m still trying to convince him it\u2019s a collector\u2019s item.<\/p>\n Now, you tell me: if you\u2019ve excavated your childhood bedroom, what did you find? Was anything strangely hard to part with? What did you do with the things you wanted to keep? <\/em><\/p>\n P.S. Where did you grow up<\/a>, and what\u2019s the age gap between your kids<\/a>?<\/p>\n (Top photo of Gisela Gueiros\u2019s apartment<\/a> by Alpha Smoot<\/a>, styling by Kate Jordan<\/a>.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cupofjo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/IMG_8314-2-scaled.jpeg\")
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